Endo v. Bush

Over at his blog, Eric Muller has been hosting a mini-symposium on Mitsuye Endo and her Supreme Court case that ended the nightmare of the Japanese American internment. The whole series was excellent, with Greg Robinson's thoughtful disquisition a real highlight.

But I was particularly struck by something Jerry Kang wrote in his excellent contribution:

Why does this interpretive dispute matter? First, in the law reviews, Endo is being remembered more triumphantly than Gudridge intended, as an example of the Supreme Court checking Executive Branch excesses, even during times of war. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Supreme Court should be blamed for its machinations, not praised for its backbone.

Second, in judicial opinions, Endo is being remembered without irony. Endo is now being cited for the "clear statement rule"--that in order to detain American citizens, the political branches must authorize such detention unambiguously. The argument goes like this: Just as the internment was not authorized back during World War II, see Endo, detention has not been authorized in the global war on terror. But this reinscribes a falsehood. FDR and Congress did authorize the internment camps. It's just that the Court declined to see to this inconvenient fact.

As a matter of history, Endo should be understood as dodging accountability. [emphasis mine] As a matter of doctrine, Endo should be treated in the same way that we treat Korematsu. Even nonlawyers know that the Korematsu case created the foundations of "strict scrutiny," which remains a critical component of our equal protection jurisprudence. In other words, as an abstract legal rule, Korematsu remains good law. However, how this rule was applied to the facts is universally disdained. Endo's abstract legal rule, demanding a clear statement, can also be preserved as good law. However Endo's application to the facts in World War II should be sharply rejected as deceitful.

If we don't, what will prevent the use of Endo to dodge accountability again? After horrific tortures in some detention camp are brought to light, low-level soldiers will be prosecuted but high-level officials will be absolved. After all, there was never any "clear statement" authorizing quite this sort of barbarism. See Endo.

This brings us to something I discussed regarding the Korematsu case, which, as Kang argues, must be seen in a similar light:

Put simply, the deference of the Court to the executive branch in wartime that Korematsu exhibited [particularly in its failure to hold the Roosevelt administration accountable for its actions] was predicated on deceptiveness from the Justice and War departments that in turn sought to obscure the nakedly racist nature of the claim of "military necessity." That is to say, when the Courts so abjectly defer to such wartime powers, the executive can expand all its powers to unimaginable heights simply on its say-so, whether truthful or not.

Probably the definitive word on this was Justice Robert Jackson's dissent in Korematsu:

The limitation under which courts always will labor in examining the necessity for a military order are illustrated by this case. How does the Court know that these orders have a reasonable basis in necessity? No evidence whatever on that subject has been taken by this or any other court. There is sharp controversy as to the credibility of the DeWitt report. So the Court, having no real evidence before it, has no choice but to accept General DeWitt's own unsworn, self-serving statement, untested by any cross-examination, that what he did was reasonable. And thus it will always be when courts try to look into the reasonableness of a military order.

In the very nature of things, military decisions are not susceptible of intelligent judicial appraisal. They do not pretend to rest on evidence, but are made on information that often would not be admissible and on assumptions that could not be proved. Information in support of an order could not be disclosed to courts without danger that it would reach the enemy. Neither can courts act on communications made in confidence. Hence courts can never have any real alternative to accepting the mere declaration of the authority that issued the order that it was reasonably necessary from a military viewpoint.

Much is said of the danger to liberty from the Army program for deporting and detaining these citizens of Japanese extraction. But a judicial construction of the due process clause that will sustain this order is a far more subtle blow to liberty than the promulgation of the order itself. A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency. Even during that period a succeeding commander may revoke it all. But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.

A lack of accountability is the key, as with FDR, to the Bush administration's mad power grab in the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedy. At every step, the administration has short-circuited any serious scrutiny of its actions through a series of steps: badgering the Republican Congress into submission, threatening its critics and accusing them of treason and anti-Americanism, and, as Glenn Greenwald has exquisitely illuminated, avoiding any kinds of court challenges to its sweeping assertion of executive powers.

I'm especially enamored of Greenwald's new book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok, which traces the origins of the NSA surveillance matter back to the Bush's decision to expand executive powers from his first days in office, but taking off with a vengeance under the banner of 9/11.

Most of all, Greenwald's book is a call to action in defense of bedrock American values -- values that are, in fact, endangered by the Bush administration's vision of a corporate America run by an all-powerful executive. It is a vision that is fueled and enabled by the environment of fearfulness, particularly a fear of amorphous terrorism, that Bush, with the full complicity of the media, has proven extraordinarily adept at fostering.

The folks at Firedoglake hosted two excellent discussions of the book, both of which are well worth reading for the many additional insights. And it was encouraging to read how many other people are becoming aware of the dangers posed by Bush's power grab.

In the comments, I noted one caveat with Greenwald's thesis:

I was very interested in Glenn's description of how he came to be concerned about the Bush administration's post-9/11 behavior, especially since he says he "was among those who strongly approved of his performance" after the attacks.

I have to admit I was far more skeptical initially. After all, it was my belief from having tracked Bush's record on antiterrorism work before 9/11 that his atrocious handling of the issue was not likely to change afterward. I too supported the decision to invade Afghanistan, but felt that even that was badly mishandled, and when the focus shifted to Iraq, I knew we were in trouble in terms of making serious headway against terrorism.

Still, I think my red flags went up at the same time as Glenn's (pp.2-3):

What first began to shake my faith in the administration was its conduct in the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in May 2002 on U.S. soil and then publicly labeled "the dirty bomber." The administration claimed it could hold him indefinitely without charging him with any crime and while denying him access to counsel.

I never imagined that such a thing could happen in modern America -- that a president would claim the right to order American citizens imprisoned with no charges and without the right to a trial. In China, the former Soviet Union, Iran, and countless other countries, the government can literally abduct its citizens and imprison them without a trial. But that cannot happen in the United States -- at least it never could before. If it means anything to be an American citizen, it means that we cannot be locked away by our government unless we are charged with a crime, given due process by the court, and then convicted by a jury of our peers.

I was alarmed by the Padilla case as well, and for the same reasons -- but from a somewhat different perspective.

I had spent much of the previous ten years researching the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, the results of which I published in my book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community. And what I knew, all too well, was that American citizens have been imprisoned with no charges and without the right to a trial; I knew that the United States government had in fact abducted its citizens and incarcerated them without a trial, it had locked them away without being charged with a crime.

And it was all done, in fact, under the same circumstances the Bush administration was now claiming gave it free rein, namely, its powers as a wartime executive.

Before Strawberry Days was published, I explored this in some detail at American Street, using some of the material that later was published in the book:

What the Japanese-American internment revealed for the first time was a hole in the traditional checks and balances of constitutional powers. In wartime, the total deference to the executive branch would lend it nearly comprehensive powers. The post-Sept. 11 response has opened another dimension to this: If wartime — as in the "War on Terror" -- becomes itself a never-ending enterprise, then the executive branch's power becomes potentially illimitable.

Up to the edge of that hole in the Constitution, the Bush administration has driven a large bus called "enemy combatant status" and parked it. It now sits, idling.

As reporter Charles Lane explained in the Washington Post, the Bush administration's creation of this status actually created a parallel legal system with secret courts that ultimately are only accountable to the president himself: "For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it."

Ultimately, the president himself would be the person making the call on just who qualifies as an "enemy combatant." And what would be the Bush administration's criteria for making these decisions?

"There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this," explained Solicitor General Theodore Olson in the Post. "There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances."

As Olson went on to explain in the Post piece, the only thing to restrain the president is the prospect of losing re-election:

Administration officials, however, imply that the main check on the president's performance in wartime is political -- that if the public perceives his approach to terrorism is excessive or ineffective, it will vote him out of office.

"At the end of the day in our constitutional system, someone will have to decide whether that [decision to designate someone an enemy combatant] is a right or just decision," Olson said. "Who will finally decide that? Will it be a judge, or will it be the president of the United States, elected by the people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of those who work for him?"

I explored this a little bit further in the American Street series:

The Padilla case remains in limbo -- though the public was recently given some insights into the government's reasoning in the case, thanks to a Wall Street Journal piece by Bradford A. Berenson, who served as associated White House Counsel under Bush. The key to the reasoning lies in this paragraph, and directly reflects Solicitor General Ted Olson's contention that the "enemy combatant" designation could be made at the whim of the president:

The president's power as commander in chief to do what is necessary to protect the nation in time of war is, as it must be, exceptionally flexible and robust. He can engage and subdue the enemy in any way he sees fit. There is no judicial check on his authority in this vital and sensitive area because there cannot be: As the Framers expressly recognized in the Federalist Papers, the 'decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch' that are the hallmarks of unitary executive power are ‘essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks.'

As Arthur Silber observed in response:

[I]f this idea were to be established and accepted, it would provide the framework -- in principle -- for an absolute dictatorship. No, that dictatorship would not arrive overnight, but history demonstrates that dictatorships can arrive slowly, by degrees and by increasingly authoritarian steps. It need not happen all at once. But under this "reasoning" and in principle, every United States citizen could be imprisoned for a lifetime. End of story.

I think this is the summation of the Bush Theory of the Executive: as a wartime president, he gets to call the shots, at his whim.

It's all about the Imperial Presidency. The principle -- just as it was for Nixon -- is the power of the president and his advisers to lie, fumble, and even break the law without consequence. Just because he's president.

In this case, we're not simply repeating history; Bush's initiatives exceed any historical precedent. But by remembering where the nation went wrong, once before, in granting the president extraordinary wartime powers, we can find ways to prevent it from happening again. It took real bravery to oppose it then; it may take equal doses of courage today.

The Divorce Amendment

MEMO: Saving the Godly Institution of Marriage
TO: Gen. J.C. Christian
FROM: Lt. Col. C. LeMay Thumper

Sir:

I know you've been watching with interest the progress of the ongoing valiant efforts to defend the sacred institution of marriage from pollution at the hand of vile homosexuals, and as your right-hand man (so to speak), I know how bitterly disappointed you must have been after its defeat by Satanic forces in the Senate.

Of course, we cannot be totally downcast. After all, our comrade-in-arms in the House, Majority Leader John Boehner, is going to bring it to a vote there. Perhaps their valiant example will inspire the Senate to reconsider. It might also help drive out the homo-Satanic element from within the ranks of God's Own Party as well and eventually leads us to the Promised Land of a Christian Nation.

However, I've also been pondering the bigger picture. It seems to me that that the gay-marriage ban is simply a defensive measure, designed to stop any further erosion in the War Against Marriage as a Sacred Institution. It only stops further decay -- but the War rages on.

Why not go on the attack? Why not try to do something about the real threat to the Institution of Marriage?

That's right: Divorce.

I realized this while poring through the Scripture and trying to unearth any obscure references to how Our Lord most assuredly hates the idea of "gay marriage," and how the Bible prohibits such a thing. I have to admit that such a thing was hard to find, though I did notice that some of the old prophets had twelve wives and a number of concubines as well, which sounds like not an altogether bad proposition. But anyway.

On the other hand, the subject of divorce seems to come up a lot, especially with the Big Kahuna Himself, right there in the New Testament:

"So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." [Matthew 19:6]

"It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery." [Matthew 5:31-32]

"The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery." [Matthew 19:3-9]

"And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? tempting him...And he saith unto them, Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery." [Mark 10:2-12]

"Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery." Luke 16:18

Now I realize that this leaves a "fornication" exception, and some later Scripture from St. Paul left a little more wiggle room:

"To the married I give this ruling, which is not mine but the Lord's: a wife must not separate herself from her husband (if she does, she must either remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband), and the husband must not divorce his wife." [1Cor.7:10-11]

All of this, in keeping with America as Christian Nation, is something that should be written into law immediately. I propose we start a 50-state campaign urging President Bush to sponsor a Divorce Amendment, marshalling all the forces of righteousness to ward off this real threat to the institution of marriage by banning it altogether, as the Lord Himself would want us to do.

Of course, it could be written to include the "fornication" exception, as well as Paul's exception for separation. Hell, I would also be in favor of an "if your wife turns into a fat dumpy nag" exception, but I haven't yet dug up the Scriptural justification for it. Give me some time, I'm sure I can.

As you know, I'm proposing this as a divorcee myself. But it has always been my feeling that if, you know, society prohibited divorce, and she had known that the consequences would include death by stoning, my ex would never have run off that hunky guitar player in the first place.

This is why I believe a Divorce Amendment is so vital. Otherwise, how will healthy white males, well within the Viagra Years, manage to retain the purity of our bodily functions? It's become much too easy for women whose minds have been polluted by the Satanic Feminist Movement to kick us out the door like dogs on the slightest of pretenses, including the normative husbandly need for relief of our precious bodily fluids on demand.

Time to marshal the Army, sir! Victory against the real forces of evil awaits.

Yours in manly Christianity,

Lt. Col. C. LeMay Thumper

The targets of the psy war

Craig Unger has a must-read piece in the most recent issue of Vanity Fair about the psy-ops component of the run-up to the Iraq war:

For more than two years it has been widely reported that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of intelligence failures. But in fact it is far more likely that the Iraq war started because of an extraordinary intelligence success—specifically, an astoundingly effective campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, which led the White House, the Pentagon, Britain's M.I.6 intelligence service, and thousands of outlets in the American media to promote the falsehood that Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program posed a grave risk to the United States.

The Bush administration made other false charges about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.)—that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes suitable for centrifuges, that Saddam was in league with al-Qaeda, that he had mobile weapons labs, and so forth. But the Niger claim, unlike other allegations, can't be dismissed as an innocent error or blamed on ambiguous data. "This wasn't an accident," says Milt Bearden, a 30-year C.I.A. veteran who was a station chief in Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and Germany, and the head of the Soviet–East European division. "This wasn't 15 monkeys in a room with typewriters."

In recent months, it has emerged that the forged Niger documents went through the hands of the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare), or operatives close to it, and that neoconservative policymakers helped bring them to the attention of the White House. Even after information in the Niger documents was repeatedly rejected by the C.I.A. and the State Department, hawkish neocons managed to circumvent seasoned intelligence analysts and insert the Niger claims into Bush's State of the Union address.

By the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, in March 2003, this apparent black-propaganda operation had helped convince more than 90 percent of the American people that a brutal dictator was developing W.M.D.—and had led us into war.

Unger's report is important because it confirms, from the inside, something that some of us observed from the outside fairly early on:

We have in fact known from even before the outset that the war against Iraq would prominently feature psychological warfare. Most people have assumed that this warfare would be directed against the enemy and the subject citizens. They have not stopped to consider that, by definition, it would also be directed toward the American public as well.

This reality raises a serious concern about the fragility of democracy during wartime. Because under the aegis of a seemingly eternal war, the American government has clearly been involving the public in its psychological combat, and has hijacked the nation's press in the process. The entire meaning of the Iraq war -- and by extension, the "war on terrorism" -- is inextricably bound up in the psychological manipulation of the voting public through a relentless barrage of propaganda.

This is why the both the runup to the war and its subsequent mishandling have been so replete with highly symbolic media events -- many of them played repeatedly on nightly newscasts -- that have proven so hollow at their core, from the declarations of imminent threat from Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, to phony images of Saddam's statue being torn down, to flyboy antics aboard airline carriers, to meaningless "handovers" of power. It also explains why certain important and humanizing symbols of wartime -- civilian casualties, the returning flag-draped coffins -- have been so notably absent from our views of the war.

The role of the media in this manipulation cannot be understated. The abdication of the media's role as an independent watchdog and its whole subsumation as a propaganda organ bodes ill for any democracy, because a well-informed public is vital to its functioning.

But the fact that the military establishment, in the context of the "war on terror," clearly views the American public as the subject of a psychological combat operation should give us all pause regarding the ability of democracy to withstand this kind of assault.

The intelligence expert Sam Gardiner made similar observations in Salon with a harder base of evidence:

The Army Field Manual describes information operations as the use of strategies such as information denial, deception and psychological warfare to influence decision making. The notion is as old as war itself. With information operations, one seeks to gain and maintain information superiority -- control information and you control the battlefield. And in the information age, it has become even more imperative to influence adversaries.

But with the Iraq war, information operations have gone seriously off track, moving beyond influencing adversaries on the battlefield to influencing the decision making of friendly nations and, even more important, American public opinion. In information denial, one attempts to deceive one's adversary. Since the declared end of combat operations, the Bush administration has orchestrated a number of deceptions about Iraq. But who is its adversary?

... The White House is also using psychological warfare -- conveying selected information to organizations and individuals to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning and ultimately behavior -- to spread its version of the war. And the administration's message is obviously central to the process. From the very beginning, that message, delivered both directly and subtly, has been constant and consistent: Iraq = terrorists = 9/11.

The president tells us that we are fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here in the United States. But I know of no one with a respectable knowledge of the events in Iraq who shares that view. My contacts in the intelligence community say the opposite -- that U.S. policies in fact are creating more terrorism.

As I observed at the time:

Nonetheless, the American public is largely oblivious to this fact, instead seeing Bush's "strong and resolute" actions as making headway against terrorism. As Gardiner explains, the "repetition of the terrorist argument is utterly consistent with the theory that one can develop collective memory in a population through repetition." This hardly the only time this technique has been used by the conservative movement, either; how many times have we heard talking points reiterated ad nauseam by conservatives (from "It's not the sex, it's the lies" to "Al Gore invented the Internet" to "Kerry is a flip-flopper") until they eventually become accepted as truth?

... It would be one thing if all this manipulation were actually for the benefit of the American public. But it has occurred in fact solely for the benefit of the conservative movement and its agenda -- an agenda that, at its core, is profoundly anti-democratic.

The danger of placing the capacity for employing these techniques in the hands of a movement whose entire raison d'etre is the acquisition of power through any means could not be more apparent. After all, we've seen it happen before, with disastrous -- even apocalyptic -- results.

The key to all of this, of course, is the behavior of the media, its reliance on storylines, and the dissemination of the information, all of which reflect an elitist, top-down model of communications. I think it's easy to predict that Unger's revelations will receive less discussion on the airwaves than the "immigration debate" and Bill and Hill's sex life, because it doesn't fit readily into the well-established storyline that the Bush administration is "well meaning."

Which leaves it up to us Webfolk to start talking about it.

The Coulter cloaca

Look, it's not as if Ann Coulter hasn't already revealed the quivering sac of pus she has for a soul, multiple times. And always, just when you think she can't crawl any lower, she turns around and does exactly that.

So her latest schtick in promoting her newest liberal-hate screed (titled Godless: The Church of Liberalism) really isn't any kind of surprise at all. It just means it's just time to fumigate again.

What she's doing is attacking the widows of the 9/11 victims who had the temerity to question Preznit Bush and, more horrifically, support John Kerry in the 2004 election. In the book, she writes:

These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was part of the closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband's death so much.

Coulter's Bizarro World Reverse Projection Mirror is on display here, to wit:

This self-obsessed woman seems genuinely unaware that there was a flesh-and-blood human toll taken on 9/11, people to whom it really happened, and vicarious watchers like Ann Coulter, whose experience of it came from watching it on TV, act as if it happened to them too. In fact, the entire country voluntarily marinated in their exquisite personal agony; the families had no choice in the matter. Apparently, granting Bush the status of a demigod, and accusing anyone -- including the actual victims and their families -- who dared question him of "treason," was part of the closure process for people like Coulter. More than that, it made her a ton of dough. But now she's a millionaire, lionized on TV and in Time cover stories, reveling in her status as a celebrity and stalked by cream-pie throwers, all because she can attract attention to herself by impugning, in the ugliest fashion, the motives of people who lost their husbands, wives, parents and children on 9/11. In fact, as long as they don't have to confront people like the family members, people like Coulter (see also Michelle Malkin) positively love to talk about 9/11 and the victims ad nauseam as justification for every little jot and tittle of their right-wing enterprise; indeed, I have never seen such a cluster of soulless hags and cads enjoying other people's deaths so much. (Can anyone say "trifecta"?)

The projection on Coulter's part, in this case, couldn't have been made more clear than in the fact that what the 9/11 families fought the Bush administration over -- having an independent commission investigate the intelligence failures of 9/11 -- was precisely the opposite of self-absorbed grief, and was in fact predicated on the crazy idea that maybe the government should look at what it did wrong in order to prevent another similar terror attack. So who, exactly, is self-absorbed here?

As ThinkProgress [via Atrios] reports, Coulter was on NBC's Today show with Matt Lauer today, and he tried to pin her down on this passage. Of course, she deflected by accusing Lauer of losing his cool, which he didn't, but Coulter is a master of avoiding the question:

COULTER: To speak out using the fact they are widows. This is the left’s doctrine of infallibility. If they have a point to make about the 9-11 commission, about how to fight the war on terrorism, how about sending in somebody we are allowed to respond to. No. No. No. We have to respond to someone who had a family member die. Because then if we respond, oh you are questioning their authenticity.

LAUER: So grieve but grieve quietly?

COULTER: No, the story is an attack on the nation. That requires a foreign policy response.

LAUER: By the way, they also criticized the Clinton administration.

COULTER: Not the ones I am talking about. No, no, no.

LAUER: Yeah they have.

COULTER: Oh no, no, no, no, no. They were cutting commercials for Kerry. They were using their grief to make a political point while preventing anyone from responding.

LAUER: So if you lose a husband, you no longer have the right to have a political point of view?

COULTER: No, but don't use the fact that you lost a husband as the basis for being able to talk about, while preventing people from responding. Let Matt Lauer make the point. Let Bill Clinton make the point. Don't put up someone I am not allowed to respond to without questioning the authenticity of their grief.

Actually, what galls Coulter about people like the 9/11 widows is that her standard response to Matt Lauer and Bill Clinton or anyone else who might possess the audacity to question in any fashion the Bush administration or conservatives generally is to accuse them of "treason" or, at worst, of "having forgotten what happened on 9/11." And that response, of course, doesn't work so well when you're talking about families of the victims.

So let's just find a way to lash them anyway. Paint them as they did Cindy Sheehan, as a left-wing, self-serving kook.

Coulter's not the first to do this; Rush Limbaugh, you'll recall, attempted a similar smear job against the widows.

What all of this obscures, of course, is the reality: that what the 9/11 families succeeded in doing was making the 9/11 Commission happen. That was the extent of their "treason." That, and backing John Kerry.

Moreover, I noted some time back, their story isn't one of partisan hackery. Several of the widows, including leader Kristin Breitweiser, were in fact Bush-voting Republicans on, and immediately after, 9/11. What turned them against Bush was how hard his White House fought even having a 9/11 investigation, as they explained when they came out for Kerry:

Gathering at the National Press Club in Washington on Tuesday, the widows announced their endorsement of the Massachusetts Democrat for president, a move made "in good conscience and from our hearts," as former Bush supporter Kristen Breitweiser told the news cameras. "In the three years since 9/11, I could never have imagined I would be here today, disappointed in the person I voted for, for president," she said. Added fellow Jersey Girl Patty Casazza: "It was President Bush who thwarted our attempts at every turn."

The widows made this political turn for one reason only: Bush fought the formation of the 9/11 commission for a year, and continued to fight its work throughout. Moreover, their intimacy with the details of the commission's findings led them to recognize the Iraq war for the abomination it is:

"Unfortunately, before the work in Afghanistan was complete ... this administration moved our most precious resources, America's sons and daughters, into Iraq, without the support of our allies. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and that is what we learned from the 9/11 commission's final report," said Lorie Van Auken of East Brunswick, N.J. "Sept. 11 was an enormous intelligence failure, and yet nothing was done to fix our intelligence after 9/11, and that same intelligence apparatus took us into Iraq. So it's doubly frustrating to learn that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11."

There was an added reason, beyond their bipartisan background, that the 9/11 families had so much credibility: they had been extraordinarily persuasive in their testimony to Congress, which was built not on emotional appeals but a devastating factual case regarding intelligence failures:

On Sept. 18, 2002, when much of the public was still sympathetic to the Bush administration position that the attacks could not have been foreseen or prevented, Breitweiser gave a statement before the joint House-Senate investigation into intelligence lapses; it may have changed the course of history.

In a concise, straightforward manner, she laid out the facts far more effectively than had any senator or representative on the panel. She asked how, for example, the CIA could fail to locate hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, who had entered the United States despite being on a terrorist watch list, when one was listed in the San Diego phone book and both roomed with an undercover FBI informant. The day after her presentation, the White House -- once firmly against an independent commission -- reversed itself and endorsed the idea. And it was the 9/11 commission that would later find no operational ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, one of the key reasons Bush gave for invading Iraq.

Breitweiser posts occasionally still at Huffblog, including a devastating retort to Karl Rove for his Coulteresque attack on liberals last year:

Karl, you say you "understand" 9/11. Then why did you and your friends so vehemently oppose the creation of a 9/11 Independent Commission? Once the commission was established, why did you refuse to properly fund the Commission by allotting it only a $3 million budget? Why did you refuse to allow access to documents and witnesses for the 9/11 Commissioners? Why did we have to fight so hard for an extension when the Commissioners told us that they needed more time due to your footdragging and stonewalling? Why didn't you want to cooperate so that all Americans could “understand” what happened on 9/11?

Since the release of the 9/11 Commission's Final Report, have you helped bring to fruition any of the commission's recommendations? Have you truly made our homeland safer by hardening/eliminating soft targets? Because, to me rebuilding a tower that is 1,776 feet tall where the World Trade Center once stood seems to be only providing more soft targets for the terrorists to hit. Moreover, your support for the use of nuclear energy seems to be providing even more soft targets. Tell me, while you write your nifty little speeches about nuclear power, do you explain to your audience how our nuclear plants will be protected against terrorist attack or infiltration? What assurances do you give that nuclear waste will not find its way into terrorist's dirty bombs and onto our city streets? And, how do you assure your audience that the shipment of radioactive material will not become a terrorist target as it rolls through their own backyards?

No wonder the Coulters of the world hate people like this. They have a tendency to shatter their Bizarro World anti-realities.

I'd kind of like to see Ann Coulter up on a stage with Kristin Breitweiser, but I'm afraid it might signal the end of the universe or something, sort of like anti-matter and matter: anti-reality meeting with reality. The problem is that Coulter, no doubt, would then just call out her thugs.

Border crossings

This is a picture of the Canadian border near Blaine, Washington, not far from where the Minutemen have been holding border watches this spring. As you can see, the border itself consists of an eight-foot-wide grassy ditch between two parallel country roads. Crossing it entails taking a short leap over the ditch.

It's in a remote part of the county and, though Border Patrol vehicles can be seen driving past from time to time, it's the kind of place where someone with a well-laid plan could easily slip over late at night.

There are a lot of places like this along the U.S.-Canada border, which at about 4,000 miles is more than twice as long as the 1,500 miles or so we share with Mexico. What's even more common, in sparsely populated regions of the Northwest especially, is large tracts of wilderness and open range where security is nearly nonexistent at worst and widely sporadic at best.

In other words, there are many more multiple opportunities for Islamist terrorists to enter the United States from Canada than there are from Mexico. Crossing the Canadian border in untracked areas, unlike the Mexican border, is neither terribly hazardous nor even particularly daunting.

However, most terrorism experts will tell you that terrorists prefer to travel incognito with fake papers and are most likely to try crossing through a regular port of entry with those papers. Remote border crossings are a real risk for such operatives because they become more exposed out in the open, rather than simply mingling in with the thousands who cross borders legally every day.

Perhaps more to the point, the presence of Al Qaeda cells in Mexico is virtually unknown, but the presence of Al Qaeda in Canada is very well established indeed, as the Ahmed Ressam case demonstrated vividly.

In other words, if you're genuinely concerned about terrorists crossing our borders, you'll increase funding for port-of-entry security and for monitoring open areas -- on the Canada border primarily.

So it seemed altogether fitting that on the day that the National Guard began its photo op, er, security mission on the Mexican border, the news from Canada came once again to remind us that, when it comes to the issue of border security as an aspect of the "war on terror," our top priority has to be the northern border, not the southern one:

Police said Monday more arrests are likely in an alleged plot to bomb buildings in Canada, while intelligence officers sought ties between the 17 suspects and Islamic terror cells in the United States and five other nations.

A court said authorities had charged all 12 adults arrested over the weekend with participating in a terrorist group. Other charges included importing weapons and planning a bombing. The charges against five minors were not made public.

The Parliament of Canada, located in Ottawa, was believed to be one of the targets the group discussed.

[Michael Stickings has more on the arrests.]

As I asked previously:

Why, if post-9/11 border security is such a suddenly serious concern, aren't we sending the Guard to the Canadian border? -- It is, after all our longest and most porous border, and its many open spots do not entail dangerous and potentially lethal desert crossings. Perhaps more to the point, the one terrorist who did try to sneak into the USA with explosives as part of a plot to attack a major metropolitan area was caught on the Canadian border.

The Ressam case was particularly revealing when it came to the presence of terrorist cells in Canada:

Ressam's plot was ultimately foiled on December 14 by Diana Dean, a U.S. border employee, but his capture would reveal that operatives were also inside America waiting to liaise with their counterparts across the Canadian border. Algerian and Brooklyn resident Abdelghani Meskini was the man supposed to meet Ressam in Seattle and was arrested a few days after the latter's capture.

On December 19, Canadian Lucia Garofalo was also arrested trying to smuggle an Algerian at a remote border crossing in northeastern Vermont. Garofalo was found to have contacts with Atmani and Meskini as well as high-ranking members of GIA cells in Europe. [7] Another Algerian with links to Meskini, Abdel Hakim Tizegha, was arrested on December 24 in Seattle, accused of being part of Ressam's group. In the weeks that followed, a number of Algerians were stopped and questioned in major cities and border regions across the United States and Canada.

Of course, the answer for dealing with this problem doesn't entail building fences, or placing National Guardsmen on the Canadian border, or setting up citizen border watches. Hell, we could place "moats, fiery moats and fiery moats with fire-proof crocodiles" on both the borders and it wouldn't work.

It entails giving the Border Patrol both the manpower and the surveillance technology it needs to adequately monitor the borders and stop foreign terrorists effectively and professionally -- instead of cutting their budget as the Bush administration has done.

So when the Minutemen and their fellow nativists start citing Sept. 11 and their fears about border security as the reason why they're really mounting their Mexico border watches -- surely, it has nothing to do with the fears about the loss of white "culture" that so many of them seem to want to talk about -- it couldn't hurt to remind them that what they're doing is far more likely to dilute a serious effort to bolster antiterrorist security where it counts the most.

And the practical effect of the nativists' border campaign so far? It isn't pretty:

It was early on a May morning, still dark, when Border Patrol agent Dan McClafferty first smelled death, its rich odor piercing the desert bouquet of sage, salt cedar and creosote. Following the beam of his flashlight, McClafferty looked under the thorny branches of a paloverde tree and found what he was looking for.

The body of the 3-year-old boy lay still, covered with a jacket and his arms crossed over his chest. His mother, found wandering along a desert highway hours earlier, had carried him there as she had tried to cross into the United States illegally.

The sad discovery was not unique. Since 1993, when the Clinton administration began a crackdown on border crossings in San Diego and El Paso, more than 3,500 people have died trying to cross into the United States through desert. And, as officials work to put more patrols and fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, immigrant advocates fear there will be more deaths among the tens of thousands who attempt the trip.

Most of the deaths so far -- 959 since Oct. 1, 2001, according to local government statistics and the Mexican government -- have been in Arizona, where the landscape comprises mountains, ranches, Indian reservations, military proving grounds and endless miles of cactus-filled desert. The boy, who was found on May 16 and whose name could not be ascertained from U.S. or Mexican officials, was one of the latest additions to the list.

This is why the current "immigration debate" is so misbegotten. As with most outbreaks of right-wing extremism in the mainstream, its eventual toll is unfailingly, inexorably, a litany of human misery and injustice.

The end of America

One of the remarkable aspects of the increasing interaction between mainstream conservatives and the extremist right on the immigration issue is the way the way they wind up feeding each other: the far right gives them talking points, the mainstream regurgitates them for mass consumption, which gives the far right the justification and affirmation it craves -- and fuels them to even greater rhetorical heights ... which then are eventually picked up and transmitted into the mainstream.

And what they primarily trade in is fear -- pure, unadulterated fear. That's why they're so big on conspiracy theories like Reconquista!

The core message is "Fear of a Brown Planet": "Look out, white people! The brown people are coming to take away your way of life! Aiiieee!!! Run for the hills!"

If you turn to the current front page at American Patrol (only click if you really have to) -- the white-supremacist border-control outfit run by Glenn Spencer of Reconquista! fame -- you'll see the following headline:

Senate Voted to End U. S. as a Nation
Surrender to Latin Invasion Now Clear

Follwed by links to a video from Lou Dobbs' CNN program of yesterday, plus a snippet from the transcript:

Lou Dobbs Tonight - CNN - June 1

Dobbs: The issue, as you said, that the nation would cease to exist, what do you mean by that?

West: Well, the kind of provisions that are in the Senate... and it will be mainly Hispanic. It will be mainly Mexican. -- And so, what the question becomes is, do we want to become a northern section of Latin America? Do we cease to become literally an English- speaking people, become bilingual, and / or Spanish- speaking? And with these questions, you really begin to get at the heart of the matter, a demographic, a newer demographic.

West is a columnist for the Washington Times whose recent piece on immigration was the center of discussion.

You have to see the whole interview for yourself to believe it, as Dobbs simply lets West broadcast her nativist nonsense unchallenged. West is promoting the crazed notion, as she put it in the column, that in its compromise immigration legislation -- which she dubs "the Dissolve America Now bill" -- the Senate voted to completely open its borders, that is, "to relocate the Statue of Liberty to the U.S.-Mexico border." In reality, the American Patrol headline isn't far removed from what West actually wrote.

Here's the transcript:

DOBBS: "Washington Times" columnist Diana West has written a provocative, disturbing look at the future of this nation and what would happen were President Bush to successfully push his amnesty program through. West writes that if amnesty were to become law, the United States would cease to be a nation altogether. She says it would become a honey trap, drawing millions of more illegal aliens into the country. Diana West joins us tonight from Washington, D.C. Diana, good to have you here.

DIANA WEST, WASHINGTON TIMES: Thank you, Lou.

DOBBS: I want to begin with something that you wrote, "a nation has borders and defends them." If we could put that up, "a nation has broken borders and defends them. 'We' do not. Otherwise, building a fence against an unprecedented invasion by Mexico wouldn't be considered a harsh and radical position in the mainstream otherwise."

Well, when the Senate passed that amendment on the immigration bill, sponsored by Christopher Dodd, put into the manager's amendments by Senator Arlen Specter. What was your reaction?

WEST: Disgust.

DOBBS: It's just amazing.

WEST: Amazement, yes. Yes. It's a situation where the United States Senate, in insisting on this ridiculous two-track bill, to have supposed security along with this incredible amnesty program, is signaling to the world that we really don't believe in the concept of borders, and that's actually what I really draw from this bill, which is extremely disturbing, because if we signal that to the world, they will come, and we really will be the world.

DOBBS: That is, the world, we're certainly going to be Mexico at this rate. Because...

WEST: That's the first part of the world.

DOBBS: ... the Mexican population, a country of about 100 million people, with an estimated 20 million of their citizens already living in this country -- many of them legally of course -- but 3 million illegal aliens crossing our borders, most of whom are Mexican citizens. The idea that this administration will not enforce the border, for national security reasons, leaving immigration aside, is to most of us, to most Americans, absolutely unbelievable.

...

DOBBS: The issue, as you said, that the nation would cease to exist, what do you mean by that?

WEST: Well, the kind of provisions that are in the Senate bill, for both legal immigration that we can try to project, and then illegal immigration that we can only imagine, has the effect of a demographic tsunami, and it will be mainly Hispanic. It will be mainly Mexican.

And so, what the question becomes is, do we want to become a northern section of Latin America? Do we cease to become literally an English-speaking people, become bilingual, and/or Spanish-speaking? And with these questions, you really begin to get at the heart of the matter, a demographic, a newer demographic.

DOBBS: The idea of a new demographic is to me, frankly, my reaction is, in terms of Hispanic, sort of what's the difference? Because we as a nation -- this is a melting pot. The issue of multiculturalism, however, and the issue of multi-language. That becomes a very serious issue, doesn't it?

WEST: Well, it does. I mean, I would say that we were a melting pot. I think that 30, 40 years of multiculturalism, however, have trashed that notion. We have been taught that that actually is not our design, and so we the people have become we the peoples. And when you import such a large demographic speaking one language, you have really altered the mix.

DOBBS: Diana West, I thank you for being here. We're out of time. I hope you'll come back soon. We're going to continue this discussion, obviously, on this broadcast in the weeks and months ahead. So please come back.

Part of what nativist hacks like West and Michelle Malkin do in their arguments is rely on a kind of Manichean rhetorical trick: assume, in the argument, that the only possible alternative to their proposal is one that is completely undesirable. Thus, they quickly label their opponents the "open borders crowd."

The fact is, however, that most of the people who are opposed to an immigration debate based on scapegoating, racism, or demonization of Latinos, or for punitive measures against those immigrants already here also happen to favor reasonable immigration reform -- nor do they argue for open borders, either. Read more here.

The Senate's immigration measure is, by any measure, ultimately only a band-aid for a systemic problem related to America's role in the global economy. But equating it with "the surrender of America" really suggests there's something in the Kool-aid they've been drinking.

But then, we kind of knew that already. We just didn't know how many mainstream media people were drinking it too.

Immigration haters

[From Sunday's Klan rally in Russellville, Alabama.]

Every time you hear folks on the anti-immigration right insist that it's just illegal immigration they're on about, and that there's nothing racist about their agenda, remember that they all say that, like they did in Columbus, Ohio, recently:

The organizer of a Statehouse rally to oppose illegal immigration has ties to what hate-group monitors say is a white-supremacist organization.

The organizers call themselves "Americans for America" and say Friday’s rally is "pro-American" and promises to be peaceful.

But the event is being promoted on what an Anti-Defamation League official said is the oldest and largest Web site for white supremacists. And its organizer belongs to a group run by David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who served one term in the Louisiana legislature.

"Just the fact that they’ve advertised on Stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi Web site, shows that they want white supremacists to show up," said Mark Pitcavage, a Columbus man who monitors hate groups for the Anti-Defamation League.

The rally organizer, Ed Bicker, said that's not true.

He acknowledged that he is involved with Duke's group, European American United and Rights Organization, and that some members of that group would probably attend the rally.

Bicker, a Cleveland resident, describes the organization as a "white civilrights" organization -- not a racist or white supremacist group -- and said Friday's rally isn't about race at all.

"We're not really concerned with where our members come from," he said. "We don't have anything against anyone."

Bicker said his group, which has a "couple dozen" members, has the same concerns as other people who oppose illegal immigration and amnesty programs. The borders should be secured and illegal residents who he said cost taxpayers millions of dollars should be sent home, he said.

"We're concerned with the excess burden illegal immigrants have on America," he said.

For the facts on that "burden," see more here. Not that facts are anything these folks respect.

Once again, we're seeing evidence that the immigration debate is becoming a major launching ground for far-right activism and recruitment. That's why, in locales around the country, they're finding that the debate is becoming truly hateful:

The Southern Poverty Law Center is reporting a rise in the past year in the number of groups it categorizes as hate groups. A Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard said a recent rally was the first he could remember that drew more supporters than protesters. And one candidate for Alabama attorney general is openly calling for martial law and the shooting of illegal immigrants who resist imprisonment and deportation.

Many of those who attend anti-immigration rallies say they aren't hateful or racist and don't have a problem with immigrants coming to the United States as long as they do it legally.

"I would guess that the more mainstream anti-immigration groups are trying to distance themselves from groups like the Klan because ... (such a group) de-legitimizes their message," said Allen Kohlhepp, a staff member with the Anti-Defamation League.

Especially disturbing was this story's description of a recent Klan rally in Alabama:

The KKK recently held an anti-immigration rally in Russellville during which it had 20 or so people apply for membership, said Ray Larsen, imperial wizard for the National Knights of the KKK from South Bend Ind. The rally drew a crowd of more than 300 that included a mix of supporters, on-lookers, and a few dozen counter protesters.

It was the first time Larsen could remember supporters outnumbering the people who came out to protest their presence. The Klan initiated several new members at a cross lighting ceremony later that night in Franklin County.

As the Montgomery Advertiser reported, the focus of the rally was immigration:

Marchers protesting proposals to give illegal immigrants amnesty and supporting calls to deport them yelled anti-immigration slogans such as "Send them back!" and "Let's get rid of the Mexicans!"

Ray Larsen, imperial wizard of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from South Bend, Ind., told the crowd on a megaphone that illegal immigrants are in America to take all the jobs and they want everyone out of America. "And I'm talking about blacks and whites," Larsen said. "They want you out of here because they want this as their land."

Afterward, Klansmen went to a field near Vina in western Franklin County and burned a kerosene-soaked 22-foot-high cross in a field. More than 30 people were in the field, with a few wearing hoods over their faces and others with their faces visible.

And it's worth noting that Don Black -- who operates Stormfront, the site where the Ohio nativists are advertising their rally -- is quoted in the Birmingham News story agreeing that the environment is much more receptive to the message he's been broadcasting for decades:

Don Black, a former KKK grand wizard who now runs the white nationalist Web site forum Stormfront, said the immigration issue has increased visits to his Web site to about 25,000 visitors a day, up by about 5,000 a day in the past couple of months.

"A lot of people are going to be attracted to our movement because of it and get a greater understanding of what we're all about because of that one issue," said Black, who runs the site from his West Palm Beach, Fla., home.

Unfortunately, the denials of racist intent are taken credulously by the majority of media folk, including the Lou Dobbses of the world -- who are equally adamant that there's nothing racist in their advocacy, either.

To some extent, this is probably because so much of the underlying fear that's driving the immigration debate revolves around the gradual crumbling of white privilege -- something that even supposedly enlightened and educated people, ensconced in their gated communities and neat suburbs, will quietly defend, while doing their best to put a nonracist face on it. The denials are reflexive -- but all too transparent.

And in case anyone thought they were stupid, the folks in pointy hoods have seen through it too.

UPDATE: Clif at American Street wonders why the reporter calls it a "cross lighting ceremony."

Malkinite fact-check

UPDATE: Argh! Significant correction: The post in question was not written by Malkin, but rather one "Bryan" -- that is, Bryan Preston, who posts regularly at Malkin's Hot Air blog and appears to be one of its chief partners. My apologies for the misattribution -- though, aside the suggestion that MEChA would like to kill all the non-Latinos in Aztlan, the rest of the rant in question actually just repeats things Malkin has already written.

___


UPDATE 2: I've edited the post to reflect the correct information.

___

The stream of misinformation from Michelle Malkin is so endless these days that you could make a full-time job of it just trying to keep up with her.

Fortunately, we have Malkin(s)Watch, which does all the heavy lifting (and a big welcome, BTW, to Ryan, the site's new contributor). But her output is so prodigious that sometimes the rest of us need to pitch in, too. And now her minions are busily spreading the same misinformation.

Take, for instance, one of the recent Hot Air ventilation by Bryan Preston, her cohort -- and linked to approvingly by Malkin at her own blog -- which attacks the student organization Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA:

"La Raza" means, literally, "the race." As in, the Latino race.

As I've explained previously, "la Raza" actually translates more closely as "the people," that is, the Latino people -- who are constituted of multiple races. That is, it is an ethnic identity -- one that specifically repudiates racial distinctions. Malkin, as I pointed out then, has also made this mischaracterization previously.

Preston goes on:

MeCHA is that band of radicals that thinks the US southwest is actually Mexican territory, though they don't necessarily want it returned to Mexico.

Oh, really? Last we heard from Malkin, the "Reconquistas" were asserting "that the American southwest rightly belongs to Mexico."

They would settle for splitting it off from the US, killing all non-Latinos that currently live there, and creating a new state called Aztlan.

This is perhaps the most outrageous claim anyone has yet made regarding MEChA, and the Malkin contingent has already come up with some doozies.

So let's be clear: Nowhere in any of MEChA's documents or rhetoric is there even a suggestion of a plan to "kill all non-Latinos that currently live there" or even the desire to do so.

Preston's accusation is nothing short of the most vicious smear possible. As I just explained, the MEChA version of "Aztlan," conceptually speaking, is of an explicitly spiritual homeland based on their heritage as native American peoples.

Preston just makes matters worse by repeating an analogy she's made previously:

And they're funding a charter school in LA. Nice. It's not too different from turning over the education of young skulls full of mush to, say, the Klan. Or the Black Panthers.

Preston thus places MEChA in the company of violent radicals whose entire histories were fraught with death and destruction. (Malkin has also compared MEChA to the Nazis.)

Well, as I explained awhile back:

Consider the record of racist organizations -- particularly those to which MEChA has been compared by conservatives in this current brouhaha. First, there is the Ku Klux Klan, which has endured even today through multiple incarnations in America. The first of these was, according to Robert Paxton, the first historical emanation of fascism, the Reconstruction Klan. Here is its record, according to Philip Dray in At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America:

Richard Maxwell Brown's comprehensive study of vigilante violence in America estimates that in the four years 1868-71 there were more than four hundred Klan lynchings in the South, Union general Phil Sheridan calculated that 3,500 whites and blacks were killed between 1865 and 1875, Ida Wells-Barnett, writing in the 1890s, put the number of Negroes killed by whites since 1865 at 10,000m with only three white men executed for crimes against blacks in that period. … Author Dorothy Sterling, who combed through man thousands of documents and oral histories in her preparation of a noted compendium on the Reconstruction era, cited 20,000 as the number killed by the Klan just in the four years 1868-71.

The Klan revived in 1916 after years of dormancy and was responsible for a broad range of lynchings, "race riots" and anti-black purges in the South over the ensuing 15 years or so. And it has continued to be associated even today with an array of hate crimes and heinous acts of terrorism against various minorities.

Overseas, the most notorious racist organizations were the European fascist governments, particularly Nazi Germany. I trust I don't even have to go there.

For those who would argue that a group like MEChA is only nascent in its racism, and could eventually wreak such horrors if its agenda flamed out of control, it is worth remembering that racist organizations nearly always display their true colors almost immediately. The Klan, as just seen, was violent and terroristic from the start; so, too, were the European fascists, particularly during the fascista and SA years.

And what has MEChA done? Advocate for increasing the numbers of Latinos in higher education. Organize student rallies. Emphasize self-determination.

It would be fun to say that the Malkin anti-MEChA contingent has finally "jumped the shark" with this pile of disinformation, but the truth is that Malkin herself triple-axeled over that baby a long time and has been playing in Fonzie's band with Pinky Tuscadero ever since.

"Unhinged" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Elimination Gaming

My last serious gaming addiction was Doom, which pretty much dates me as far as these things go. At some point, I had to choose between being a gamer or being a writer, and I obviously picked the latter.

My experience with video games has always made me skeptical of the charges that these games lead to mass murders and mental health issues, which often seem like the latest version of the comic-book and rock-and-roll they're-polluting-our-youth hysterias.

Still, there was something about the role-playing and first-person games that deeply hooked me. Maybe it was finally getting to play out my youthful comic-book fantasies in real time, to see how I responded under pressure. Maybe it was dwelling in a fantasy world. Whatever it was, once I got into the games, they invaded my thoughts away from them, even in dreams.

Nonetheless, the end feeling, even when I won, was kind of hollow -- more emotionally draining than fulfilling. And when I sat back, I realized that I wasn't getting much out of it, other than the satisfaction of figuring out an extremely ornate puzzle. So I moved on. But that was just me, and understand well why people are drawn to them.

Now, when I read about video games like the one that lets you shoot border crossers that was created by white supremacists, I tend not to worry much: it's simply a cartoonish Flash-based game with little depth or resonance. It's a novelty that won't be getting anyone hooked.

Much more troubling, in my view, are games like the one described recently by Jonathon Hutson at Talk2Action (via Crooks and Liars):

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission -- both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state -- especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.

... This game immerses children in present-day New York City -- 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian. The game also offers players the opportunity to switch sides and fight for the army of the AntiChrist, releasing cloven-hoofed demons who feast on conservative Christians and their panicked proselytes (who taste a lot like Christian).

Paul the Spud at Shakespeare's Sister notes just how bizarre the worldview of the game really is:

This is really incredible... a "Christian" video game, the purpose of which is to kill as many people as possible. And not only non-believers... no no no. Other Christians (not true Christians like you, the player, of course) are also fair game! It's all done in the name of Jesus.

As Hutson's piece goes on to explain, Warren -- described by Time Magazine as one of the most influential evangelicals in America -- is the front man for a large Dominionist organization whose purpose is nothing short of fundamentalist theocracy in America:

Could such a violent, dominionist Christian video game really break through to the popular culture? Well, it is based on a series of books that have already set sales records -- the blockbuster Left Behind series of 14 novels by writer Jerry B. Jenkins and his visionary collaborator, retired Southern Baptist minister Tim LaHaye. "We hope teenagers like the game," Mr. LaHaye told the Los Angeles Times. "Our real goal is to have no one left behind."

The Dominionist -- or, if you like, Christian nationalist -- faction at work here is deliberately targeting young people, as in the recent Battle Cry rallies attracting young audiences in the thousands to their particularly martial brand of Christianity.

And gaming offers a particularly vulnerable recruitment window, because of the immersive qualities of richer, well-designed games like this. The strangely Manichean worldview -- you are either with the theocrats or against them -- combined with the overt eliminationism of the actual play involved seems to suggest the authors are intent on inculcating a deeply totalist mindset.

My friend Mrs. Robinson, a Silicon Valley refugee who comments frequently here, sent me a note along with the link to this piece:

I spent eleven years in the games business. I left in large part because I realized that most of what was being turned out by the mid-'90s were games designed to desensitize kids to killing, either covertly or very overtly. I felt like I was helping the right-wing train its next generation of soldiers. It wasn't a good feeling. I needed to do something else.

When something like Abu Ghraib or Haditha happens, I feel the weight of that all over again. This game...well, I guess it speaks for itself.

Here it is: your at-home training camp for the next generation of eliminationists.

It will be revealing, I think, to see how many good "Christians" snap up copies of this game -- and how many actually endorse it or defend it.

The GOP vs. the American birthright

Washington state's Republican Party has been trying to wean itself from the influence of the far right for much of the past decade, particularly after the debacle of Ellen Craswell's run for governor in 1996. It hasn't done them a lot of good -- they manage to keep losing anyway, though the last gubernatorial race was a doozy.

So now, thanks to the immigration debate, they're back to embracing the far right. And tagging along for the ride is at least one of the party's U.S. House members.

At last weekend's state GOP Convention, the party adopted a platform including a resolution calling for a measure to deny citizenship to children born to illegal immigrants. It also endorsed a guest-worker program that would require all applicants to return to their home countries first.

Such obviously punitive measures against Latinos got a big thumbs up from Rep. Dave Reichert, a Republican congressman from King County's 8th District, which is mostly the Eastside and parts of the south end:

Congressman Dave Reichert told me yesterday that he is willing to consider a proposal that would end automatic citizenship for babies born here. "It makes sense to me. This is people taking advantage of the system," he said. Reichert said that he has heard stories of pregnant Mexican women "just moments before the baby is born crossing the border and having the baby in a parking lot ... then claiming they can't leave because their baby is a citizen."

State Attorney General Rob McKenna, a Republican, said denying citizenship to babies born in the United States would be unconstitutional. Reichert said that is something "for the lawyers" to hash out. "I think that has to be part of the entire discussion that has to take place," he said.

Hey, Congressman Dave! I've heard stories that Gary Ridgeway secretly performed a voodoo mind transplant back when you interviewed him and that, in reality, he now occupies your skull. Should I believe them? Should I report them to the press credulously?

Now, back to Planet Earth ... The reality is that yes, there are some women who cross the border to take advantage of American hospitals and American citizenship for her child. But the child's citizenship does nothing to grant her any rights to remain in this country, and she can be deported at any time.

Perhaps more to the point, their numbers are really quite tiny, especially compared to the large numbers of people who are crossing for the No. 1 reason we have illegal immigrants: jobs. I've discussed this issue before, and the abiding point remains: People aren't crossing our borders to have kids. They're crossing our borders to work.

So why, Congressman Dave, should we change the Constitution -- indeed, one of its most cherished tenets, among a nation of immigrants -- for something that isn't really a problem?

Washington's Republicans, I suppose, can take comfort in knowing that they are just living up to the legacy of their forebears -- namely, the nativists of yore who took up the cause of fighting off the "invasion" of America's shores by an "alien horde" ... from Asia.

After all, the first "illegal immigrants" were Asians. The nakedly racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first law to attempt to limit immigration to America; prior to that, immigration had been open to anyone, though citizenship was reserved to "free white persons" and then expanded in 1870 to include people of African descent.

So Asian immigrants, including those from Japan, were precluded from becoming American citizens by law. And it was in the context of racial agitation about those later Japanese immigrants that it was first suggested that the 14th Amendment be altered to exclude citizenship for the "undesirable" Japanese.

You see, the Japanese were deemed "unassimilable," people who could never be admitted in white society, and of course a great deal of sexual fetishism ("Would you want your daughter to marry an Oriental?") was thrown in for good rhetorical measure. Because of that, the prospect of little brown citizens with suspected loyalties to Japan was deemed a real threat -- mostly to the "purity" of white culture.

The original 1919 platform of the California Oriental Exclusion League -- headed by Republican State Senator J.M. Inman -- ran as follows:

1. Cancellation of the "Gentlemen's Agreement"
2. Exclusion of the "Picture Brides"
3. Rigorous exclusion of Japanese as immigrants
4. Confirmation of the policy that Asiatics shall be forever barred from American citizenship
5. Amendment of the Federal Constitution providing that no child born in the United States shall be given the rights of an American citizen unless both parents are of a race eligible to citizenship.

Likewise, the American Legion's national platform, adopted at its first convention in 1919, called for similar measures:

Abrogation of the so-called "gentlemen's agreemen" with Japan, and the exclusion of Japanese from the United States on the same basis as other Oriental races.

Amendment to Section one of the Fourteenth Amendment to the effect that no child born in the United States of foreign parentage shall be eligible to citizenship unless both parents are eligible.

There was even some official support for these measures, as well as the ongoing fearmongering about little Nisei children. The most notable of these was an official report titled California and the Oriental, authored by the State Board of Control. As Roger Daniels describes in The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion:

According to Governor [William D.] Stephens [in the report's preface], the greatest danger to white California came from the high birth rate of these alien people: "the fecundity of the Japanese race far exceeds that of any other people." The report tried to prove that the Japanese birth rate was nearly three times that of the white. It showed the 15,211 Japanese women had given birth to 4,378 children in one year, while 313,281 married white women had given birth to 30,893 children in a similar period.

But, as Daniels goes on to explain, this was pure statistical manipulation:

The figures prove absolutely nothing, for they are in no wise comparable. Because of the special conditions of Japanese immigration, almost all Japanese wives were, for the period cited, in the first years of marriage and of prime childbearing age. To compare such a group to a different group of women ranging from 15 to 45 years of age and married for widely varying periods of time was patently absurd, except for purposes of propaganda. As a point of fact, perhaps in part as a result of the lack of any religious inhibitions about birth control, the long-range Issei birth rate was somewhat below that for contemporary immigrant groups from Europe, and only slightly above the rather low native-white birth rate in the twenties and thirties.

The anti-Japanese agitation of 1919-24 culminated in the passage of the Immigration_Act_of_1924, also known as the "Asian Exclusion Act." It was the first law to create a system of national quotas -- and all immigrants from Asia were specifically excluded.

But those old beliefs about Japanese citizens in their midst never went away, and resurfaced with a vengeance in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, and amid the discussion that resulted in the mass incarceration of all Japanese Americans.

In the U.S. Senate, Tom Stewart of Tennessee proposed stripping citizenship from anyone of Japanese descent: "A Jap's a Jap anywhere," he said.

This proposal had wide support on the Pacific Coast. Fairly typical was a letter to the Post-Intelligencer from a woman named Charlotte Drysdale of Seattle:

It has been interesting to note how many contributors have been afraid we would have no garden truck if the Japs are sent to concentration areas. We had gardens long before the Japs were imported about the turn of the century, to work for a very low wage (a move for which we are still paying dearly) and we can still have them after we have no Japs.

Isn't that discounting American ability just a little too low?

And by Americans I mean not the children of the races ineligible to naturalization. The mere fact that a child is born in this country should not give him the rights and privileges of citizenship.

The fourteenth amendment, granting automatic citizenship to American born, was placed there for the protection of the Negro and at that time the great infiltration of Japs was not even thought of. In recent years there has been so much fear of hurting the feelings of these people that no one has had the courage to try to rectify the situation. Now it would seem that the time is ripe to put things right, for once and for all time.

During the war, though restrictions against Asians began to lift; the Chinese exclusion was repealed in 1944 because of our alliance with her, and Filipinos likewise were granted similar naturalization rights. After the war, and the blood sacrifice of the 442nd established once and for all the loyalty of Japanese Americans, all racial restrictions against naturalization were removed (in 1952. And in 1965, we abolished the system of national-origin quotas.

It has to be understood that the entire immigration debate is ultimately founded on the continuing inadequacies of immigration law, especially for coping with the market realities of the American economy, where the demand for cheap labor is drawing so many immigrants they all cannot fit in under the law, and those of the Mexican economy, where the government is overwhelmed and failing.

Some people want to address this by changing the law to reflect realities, as well as to push for its full enforcement, which must include measures to stop the abuse of illegal immigrants simply by virtue of their "illegality", and to crack down on the large employers (who can shrug off current fines) whose cheap-labor push is diluting the living standard for all Americans.

And some people want to address this with ineffective measures that mostly victimize children.

Nice to know which side a good Republican like Dave Reichert is on.

Noemie Maxwell at Washblog has more.

[Note: Reichert, as Goldy notes, is very vulnerable this year. Be sure to check out the Web site of his opponent, Darcy Burner, who recently was named by Matt Stoller to the netroots list of congressional candidates.]

Energizing the racist right

You know, it's possible to make a case that immigration is an important problem that needs addressing without resorting to racist rhetoric and scapegoating -- though, Lord knows the nativist right hasn't figured that out yet.

But I think you can also make the case that, in reality, it isn't that big a problem, especially placed in the perspective of the life-and-death issues at stake in the fight against terrorism, or the looming threat of global warming, which strikes at our very survival as a species.

What strikes me in any event as far more significant than immigration is the way the nativists piling onto the issue have resurrected the racist right in America.

It's now OK, apparently, to talk about preserving the white majority, as national media anchors have done recently, without having anyone point out that you're regurgitating David Duke's talking points.

And the effect that's having on the ground, besides getting a lot of mainstream folk nodding along, is that it is drawing the old racist right -- the National Alliance, the Klan, the Council of Conservative Citizens -- out into the open. They're emboldened now because they can hear things they've been saying in their meeting halls for years now being bandied about by Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly.

All the whining from the pro-Minuteman faction about "media bias" notwithstanding, most media coverage so far has just tiptoed around this reality.

So give some credit to Time Magazine for recognizing it, and reporting on it:

With immigration perhaps America's most volatile issue, a troubling backlash has erupted among its most fervent foes. There are, of course, the Minutemen, the self-appointed border vigilantes who operate in several states. And now groups of militiamen, white supremacists and neo-Nazis are using resentment over the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. as a potent rallying cry. "The immigration furor has been critical to the growth we've seen" in hate groups, says Mark Potok, head of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The center counts some 800 racist groups operating in the U.S. today, a 5% spurt in the past year and a 33% jump from 2000. "They think they've found an issue with racial overtones and a real resonance with the American public," says Potok, "and they are exploiting it as effectively as they can."

Both Potok's group and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) are worried that extremists are burrowing their way into the anti-immigration mainstream. Mark Martin, 43, of Covington, Ohio, is a chef at a French restaurant and tends his backyard organic garden. But he also dons the black and brown uniform of western Ohio's National Socialist (read: Nazi) Movement. "There's nothing neo about us," he says. Martin admits he frequently harasses day laborers and threatens them with deportation. "As Americans, we have the right to make a citizen's arrest and detain them," he insists. "And if they try to get away, we have the right to get physical with them." Martin gleefully boasts about leading eight fellow storm troopers in disrupting a May 1 pro-immigrant rally in Dayton by taunting protesters. Although police ultimately restrained him, Martin believes his agitation was worthwhile because it attracted new recruits. "After the rally, the Klan called us," he says. "Now we've started working together more often."

In addition to white supremacists, the immigration debate seems to have reinvigorated members of the antigovernment militias of the 1990s. Those groups largely disbanded after the Oklahoma City bombing orchestrated by militia groupie Timothy McVeigh and, later, the failure of a Y2K bug to trigger the mass chaos some militia members expected. "We've seen people from Missouri and Kentucky militias involved in border-vigilante activity, especially with the gung-ho Arizona group Ranch Rescue that used face paint, military uniforms and weapons," says Mark Pitcavage, fact-finding director of the ADL. "It's a natural shift. Militias fell on hard times, and this anti-immigration movement is new and fresh."

No doubt, though, we'll hear more whining that this kind of reportage is just "playing the race card."

It's the racism, stupid

News Flash: Reiterating white-supremacist talking points is OK if you're talking about immigration, because the immigration debate itself, you see, is innately non-racist.

That seems to be where we are at after Lou Dobbs issued his "regrets" that he used a graphic about "Aztlan" citing the Council of Conservative Citizens, his office telling Greg Sargent:

A freelance field producer in Los Angeles searched the web for Aztlan maps and grabbed the Council of Conservative Citizens map without knowing the nature of the organization. The graphic was a late inclusion in the script and, regrettably, was missed in the vetting process.

Er, OK.

Except, um, as Digby says:

The problem isn't that the map was from the CCC, it's that the CCC is making maps about this alleged issue and you are reporting it as if it's credible. Nobody's alarm bells went off today when they found out that a racist organization was pimping this ridiculous notion that there is a serious movement to take over several western states? No, nothing, just regret that they didn't pull the right map off the internet --- you know, the one that didn't have the words CCC on the bottom. The intention behind the story is just hunky dory.

Alex Koppelman drives the point home:

CNN is trying to play this off as an isolated mistake. Don't be fooled: it's not. The fact that Dobbs and reporter Casey Wian showed the CCC map only makes the subtle pattern of racist fantasies given voice on Dobbs' show more visible. (By the way, relatively unnoticed -- the same night Dobbs was citing the CCC, he was leaving unchallenged, even laughing along with, one guest's suggestion that in order to get rid of illegal Mexican immigrants New Yorkers should order pizza and then arrest the delivery person. Thanks, Lou. We'll get right on that.) For months now, Dobbs and Wian have been reporting on "reconquista" and "Aztlan" movements, movements that exist not in the minds of mainstream Mexicans but in the fever dreams of white supremacists. That Dobbs eventually aired material pulled directly from a white supremacist organization should surprise no one -- when you're subtly citing them on a regular basis, the unfiltered truth is bound to bubble up at some point.

Just for some clarification: There is in fact a Latino hate group called La Voz de Aztlan (discussed here some time back) which does propound a racist vision of a Latino "Aztlan" homeland encompassing the American Southwest. It is a tiny fringe group with no large following and no known influence among Hispanic activists or in the larger Latino community.

Another Latino group, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA, is often accused of promoting the same kind of vision of "Aztlan." I've discussed the MEChA claims numerous times, most notably here here and here. There is no evidence whatsoever that their talk of "Aztlan" reflects an intent to "invade" the United States and return it to Mexico; nor is there a scintilla of evidence that this is the intent of the Mexican government, as Casey Wians and others constantly imply. What it reflects is a belief that they have a historical right to be here as part of their homeland, and moreover, that they intend to fully enfranchise themselves politically -- as Americans. Their notion of "Aztlan," as numerous documents make clear, is more of a spiritual homeland.

However, what has happened since the late 1960s -- when MEChA leaders produced the "Aztlan" documents in question -- and the late 1980s was that, while MEChA itself evolved into a campus-service organization, white-supremacist organizations began culling these old documents and touting them as evidence of a Mexican plan to "invade" America. As I detailed recently, chief among these was a fellow named Glenn Spencer and his American Patrol organization, which has been clamoring about the "Reconquista" theory for well over a decade. His claims have simarly circulated throughout the white-supremacist right.

Thus, the obsession with "Aztlan" -- which, as far as Latinos are concerned, mostly appears in a few relatively obscure '60s-era documents and among a fringe hate group -- has for most of the past decade and longer been almost exclusively the purview of white supremacists: American Patrol, VDare, American Renaissance, the National Alliance, the CofCC, the Barnes Review, and the like.

So when you hear talk about "Reconquista" -- which has not appeared in any MEChA documents or speeches -- the chances are nearly certain that this is where the talk originates. That's who draws up these maps, and touts the claims of an "invasion" incessantly.

Nonetheless, pointing out that racists are the people promoting these hobgoblins just raises a predictable whine: "Can't we talk about immigration without being accused of racism?"

The comments to Alex Koppelman's post at Huffington were particularly ripe with this. Rather typical was this:

Here we go again. Lou Dobbs is a racist, anyone who is against illegal immigration is a racist and so on and so on. Just goes to show what I have always suspected, Liberals are just as narrow minded and just as big a liars as the Conservatives.

Moderates, Independents and all others who think other than the current Democratic lock-step rhetoric be prepared to be smeared. Some moral high ground you folks staked out.

Let's be clear: We don't know if Lou Dobbs is a racist. But he reported credulously a racist conspiracy theory, citing a racist organization -- which doesn't necessarily imply that he's a racist, but certainly raises questions about both his judgment and his credibility.

What I think critics of the extremist right's involvement in the immigration debate consistently have said is that talking about reforming immigration is legitimate, as is border security. Certainly, there's been a long-running discussion of immigration issues at this blog as well.

However, I haven't heard any of the nativist right's immigration reformers talking about measures that would actually slow the flow of immigrants beyond building fences and deporting Mexicans, none of which are either effective or humane. I haven't heard any of them talking about an effective economic program for Mexico, nor about taking away plausible deniability and light fines for the employers -- especially the big corporate ones -- who are taking advantage of illegal immigrants and the rest of us too, all in the name of cheap labor.

What, in turn, raises questions of racism is how readily the discussion turns to how Latinos are polluting or diluting white culture, how they're bringing crime and disease, turning America into "a third world cesspool," how they're "invading" the country. In other words, it isn't talking about immigration that makes people hear racism; it's talking racist shit that does.

And when you parrot and cite propaganda from white supremacists, well, that just kinda seals the deal.

It isn't just on the ground, talking around the water coolers and over beers, that this is happening. It's happening on a national basis with major media figures -- including not just Lou Dobbs but a whole host of others:

-- Mickey Kaus cites eugenicist Steve Sailer approvingly in comparing the U.S.-Mexican border to the Palestinian-Israeli border.

-- Fox's Bill O'Reilly starts dredging up notions about how a "white Christian culture" is being overthrown in America by a would-be multicultural "rainbow coalition."

-- Every right-winger on the planet (led by the Malkin Brigades) goes apeshit over the Spanish-language version of the national anthem, including President Bush. Er ... Oops!

-- Suddenly, declaring English the official language is an asset to our national security.

-- You can't watch a news broadcast on the immigration debate without hearing some right winger or another declaring, once again, that the current wave of immigration constitutes "an invasion." And what was that about Aztlan again?

The country could stand a good, honest debate about immigration policy. But we aren't going to have one if the whole purpose of the exercise is to scapegoat brown people.

And for those who think that is what the debate's about, well ... you better take a good hard look in the mirror when you whine about other people playing the "race card". Because we all can see who slapped that baby out on the table in the first damned place.